


Ghost Town

by Fillyjonk



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-27
Updated: 2011-09-27
Packaged: 2017-10-24 02:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fillyjonk/pseuds/Fillyjonk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-SR.  AU.  </p><p>I don’t want to play ‘Mandy,’ but Starsky insists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Town

**Author's Note:**

> So, in the summer of 2011 I accidentally fell back in love with a man I had last seen in 1977. Paul Michael Glaser, you are so fine, and when you poisoned-tumble out of bed and your PJ bottoms slide down and bare your midriff, you make my middle-aged heart remember what it feels like to be fifteen and open-happy. 
> 
> Don't judge me for writing S&H fanfic. The heart wants what the heart wants.

Music is a ghost.

  
Smell first, but music second.

 

Grace bought us the soundtrack to “I Am Sam.”  It came out when she was 17, 18 maybe.  And with the ecstatic joy of the young who think they’re the first ones ever to discover something – the Beatles, for Christ’s sake!  – she cued up “Across the Universe” and asked innocently if we had ever heard this song.  Disappointed, when Annie caught my eye and winked, and we started singing along.  Rufus Wainwright, a fine artist in his own right, and close enough to the original that there were no surprises.

 

And even though it was twenty years at least, I expected the hitch and lurch of the scratched record at the end: “on and on – on and on – on and on.”  But the CD was new, and the sound quality was excellent.  There was no hitch.  A tiny ghost, fluttering in my chest, though I hadn’t thought of that scratched record in two decades, and wouldn’t have been able to tell you it was still with me.  But there it was.  Annie caught my eye as we sang, and I winked at my daughter, and laughed at the ghost, startled but pleased.  Been a while.  Where you been?

 

And Grace is 27 now, with a baby of her own.  The smell of the talcum powder and the diapers and the strained carrots are ghosts themselves, ghosts of Grace’s babyhood, and the people we were three decades ago when she was born.  And for Annie, double-ghosted, with Daniel, too.

 

 

***

 

 

I told Annie just a little bit, that first night when I learned about Daniel. 

“I had a friend once, and he loved a girl who died – Terry - and he kept listening to ‘Across the Universe’ – that Beatles song, it was one of her favorite albums.  You know it?  You know it.”

 

A nod.

 

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the photo in my hands – the beautiful blonde boy - and dug around for the memory.  Annie was watching me, her eyes still gleaming, and I was nervous – still new enough to get nervous, trying to tell something important.

 

“And so -  so he said he couldn’t stop thinking how could she vanish like that - about how everything inside her could be here one day, and gone the next.  Like – like her laugh, and the way she held the ball when she shot a layup.  All these songs on the radio that she knew by heart and she would sing them, screaming really loud when she was driving.”

 

Annie was lying on her right side, her head propped up on her hand. She didn’t move; just waited.

 

“And he thought – He said, where does all that stuff go?   Is it just gone?  How can that be true?”

 

Annie gave a small nod.

 

“That last line in ‘Across the Universe.’  How does that line go?”

 

Annie looked up and rocked her head, listening to the music in her mind, moved her lips quietly for a minute and then sang, “Limitless undying love that shines around me like a million suns and calls me on and on across the universe…”

 

I smiled. 

 

“Yeah.  Yeah, that’s it.  He uh… he said he hoped it was like that – like the minute you died, everything in you was - was released.  Uncaged, out into the universe.  And all the music, and it’s playing so loud, and it just goes out and on.”

 

Annie took the photo from my hand, and ran a finger across it, stroking the cheek that was only ink and paper, now.  Then she put her hand on my cheek.  Tears came again.

 

“I hope he was right.”

I nodded, and my voice cracked.  “Me, too.”

 

We lay quiet for some time.  I almost said more, but the night was already heavy, and the one photo was enough.

 

 

***

 

 

California is cleaner than I remember – less smog, less litter, less grunge.  There was prosperity, between when I left and when I came back, and prosperity is cleaner than poverty.  Although… the prosperity is gone now.  Maybe I’m just driving down nicer streets.  Age has its rewards:  platinum cards and high credit limits, nicer cars and nicer hotels.

  
Everything is so different that I second-guess my route; I'm not sure anymore what is the best way to get to the PCH.  More cars and less open space.  And the ocean surprises me, being on the wrong side of the road.  I've gone east coast.

 

It took me two years to leave.  Two months of feeling like I’d been hit in the chest, ragged hole there, listening to the Beatles to fill the quiet when sleep didn’t come, until the record was scratched and I still played it.  And six months of seeing ghosts everywhere, on every corner – all it took was someone’s hair like his, or a swaggering gait, and came the sudden remembering shock, until the shock became normal and I stopped forgetting, stopped expecting.  A year of knowing other people were studying me, to see how I was holding up.  And in answer to their polite questions, the only response: “I’m holding up.” Not: “I still drive around talking to him.” Not: “I feel like an amputee,” because God, who needs to hear that?  Two years of walking around the same streets, sitting in the same bars, doing the job – the goddamned job - because I didn’t know what else to do.  I had enough money to get me through a year, maybe two, if I lived cheap.  Leave, leave, and go somewhere that every corner doesn’t remind you.

 

Boston is different.  The ocean is on the other side.  North: water right, south: water left.  There are rocky coasts in Maine, where we vacation, but different – colder, greener.  No wildfires in summer.  Fog, not smog.  Atlantic winter, and that’s a new smell, and the only memories it holds are of Annie and Grace.  It’s good.

 

 

***

 

 

 

Thirty years, and I hadn’t been further west than Indiana, back when Grace was at Notre Dame, and now I needed to go.  Annie agreed with me. 

“Do you want me to come with you?” she said, when I brought it up.

“No,” I said.  “I think – I think I’d like to try – “

 

I didn’t finish, because words are inadequate sometimes.  Annie understood.  Some days, Grace and I visit Daniel with her.  We’re friendly acquaintances to him, but strangers, really.  Some days, when I drive by the cemetery, I see Annie’s car there, and know she’s having a private conversation.  Some days she tells me where she’s going, and I say, “Tell him hello for me.”

 

Cambridge is busy – not Boston proper, but not a small town - and when Grace came along, we talked about moving out, going west, going suburban.  But Annie needed to be close to the places that marked Daniel in her mind: first words, first steps, favorite playground, preschool.  She said it kept him with her, and maybe she’s right.  I ran; she stuck. 

 

I’m driving north and the ocean is on my left.  I glance at the GPS attached to the windshield, then at the paper lying on the passenger side.  Sterling Brown.  1320 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara.  661-840-6680.  It would be quicker to take the 101, but the coast highway is something to see again, and I’ve got all day.

 

 

***

 

 

I worked in the Brattle Book Shop when I first went east – an astoundingly fine job with little pay.  The smell of antique books in my nose all day, and lots of time to read.  And Annie, coming in a few times a week.  After we got to know each other, we started to eat lunch together on Tuesdays, regular.  I didn’t officially ask her out for a month or two after that, but it was very good, very fast.  I think she’d been sleepwalking for three years, and maybe she woke up when she met me.  The incredible force of my personality – or maybe you can only sleep so long.

 

I had put a lot of things into storage before I moved, but I had a box in the closet.  Annie dug it out one night, after a month or so, and found the badge and the two framed photos I had.

 

“You were a _cop_ in California?” she said, too-loud.  “You told me you needed a change of scenery - that you were burnt out in your job.  But a cop?”

 

I smiled.  “Not just cop.  S _uper_ cop.”

  
She picked up one of the photos.  It was black and white, one from a group that had hung on the bulletin board in the station hallway, after a department picnic.  I don’t remember who took it – don’t know if I ever knew.  A bunch of us were shooting hoops, and someone with a camera had caught Starsky and me.  He was looking at me, gesticulating, telling me something.  I was smiling, watching the action.  I didn’t pay attention to the photo when it was on the bulletin board, but someone gave it to me afterwards, and I put it in a simple frame and held onto it.

 

“That’s my partner,”  I said.

 

“He still on the force?”

 

I took the photo, rubbed the glass where there was a smudge.

 

“No,”  I said.  “He, uh…” I cleared my throat.  “He died.”

 

Annie watched my face, and didn’t say anything.  I hadn’t told the story yet – in California, everyone had known.  Short version, Hutch.

 

“He was shot.  He uh… they were aiming at both of us, but he took three bullets.”

 

The rest of it – my getting to know Daniel, her getting to know Starsky – fell here and there in our lives together, in small talk and the little ghosts that stirred the day she cried in Sears when the TV played ‘Somebody Come and Play,’ and the morning we were stuck at a light and a man staggered into our car, draped himself across the hood, and looked me in the eyes, and Annie said, “That was scary,” and I said, “He’s a heroin addict.”

 

 

***

 

 

When Grace was ten, she brought home a dog.  Some kind of a brown-black mutt – greyhound and bull terrier, maybe, with a heavy barrel chest and a narrower, muscular hind end.  She named the dog Hal – she’d just seen “2001: A Space Odyssey” – and when the lost dog posters and the phone calls to shelters didn’t turn up his owner, we were helpless to tell Grace she couldn’t keep him.  We had a fenced yard, and the dog was so damned happy.

 

For ten days or more, I felt like I knew the dog from somewhere.  It was niggling at me, and I must have mentioned it to Annie four or five times. 

“Past life,” she said, patting my forearm with tolerance.  “Maybe he was your dog in Japan, when you were a samurai.  Or maybe he was by your side at the Battle of Gettysburg.”

 

It was early October in New England.  Golden leaves, crisp nights, the smell of must and earth and ground overlaid by the smell of summer that still erupts when the afternoon comes.  The angle of the sun, or maybe the yellow from the trees – I don’t know, but the light is perfect. 

 

Annie and I were in the yard, and I was kicking an old soccer ball around for the dog, burning his energy.  He picked the ball up, barely able to maintain a grip, and then his tail went up and he trot-danced away, proud of himself.  His hind legs had a strange, bow-legged swagger then, and I swear he was laughing at me.  And it hit me that his gait was what I knew – his laughing prance and his bow-legged stance. 

 

“It’s Starsky,” I said to Annie.

 

“What?”

 

“Starsky.  That’s who the dog reminds me of.”  I laughed and shook my head.

 

Annie laughed back at me.

 

“Well,” she said.  “I’ve only ever known Starsky from your photos – but I have to say I don’t see the resemblance.”

   
That night, when she went up to bed, I stayed downstairs for a little longer.  Maudlin, maybe, having another beer and brooding about a dog who looked like my dead partner.  But it wasn't the resemblance that made me maudlin - it was the forgetting. 

Time was when I could conjure him whole, hold long conversations with him.  He had been so clear, so sharp in my mind, alive still, that every street corner carried a ghost of him, that I had moved east to shake him loose.  And now, with the past growling farther back every day, I had done it, lost him without knowing: his hands, his voice, his sauntering, laughing walk.   God.  A string of things you love drops behind you as life goes on – your first grade teacher, and the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen, and Starsky - and you look back but they recede, and God, how can you forget them? but you do.

 

Annie knew I’d been crying when I went to bed, and I tried to explain.  She was patient with my boozy breath and my waking her up. 

 

When I boarded my plane yesterday, Annie hugged me and put my cap on, and said, “Tell him hello for me.” 

 

 

***

 

 

I call Sterling Brown to make sure he’s home – though I can’t bring myself to call him Sterling Brown.  The GPS gives me good directions, through the little grid of streets to a section of bungalows on the east side of Santa Barbara.  So quaint, so staid, so conventional.

 

I knock on the front door.  It only takes a second before it opens.  He has stayed so thin, still wiry.  Impossibly so. 

 

“Huggy,” I say.  A smile lights his face, and he opens his arms, and I hug him, long. 

He pulls back and looks me over.  His eyes are wet – I think mine are, too.

 

“You got old, Hutch.”

 

I laugh, say, “You haven’t aged a bit,” and he pulls me inside.

 

The little house is dark oak paneling and mission furniture and arts and crafts wallpaper.  A wine rack.  Christ, Huggy.

 

Photos of Grace and the baby.  We start drinking quickly.  Then we wade through the string of “whatever happened to” and “do you ever hear from” and “graduated from Harvard.”  

 

We start talking for real after the alcohol takes hold.  We pick over our stories, choosing the ones that make us laugh.  Sweet Alice, clinging to me, and Dobey’s bellow.  We paint the city as it was in the 70s – snitches and strippers, guns and disco, and the clothes, the clothes.  Starsky. 

 

The laughing is good, but all those stories dance around the same ending.  Our words come more slowly, and our eyes stop smiling.

 

“I can’t believe you haven’t been back to the west coast,” he says, and I look down. 

“Well…  when Annie and I got married, and Grace came so quickly, and - things get crazy with a baby.”

 

He raises his eyebrows.  The baby is almost thirty.

 

I shrug, palms up.   Like a blow to my chest: his face against the wheel – white, still - and kneeling down I can smell the blood.  I shake my head and inhale deeply.

 

We’ve drunk – not fast, but not slow, either – for hours, and I know I’m too tipsy and too tired to get behind the wheel.  It’s almost midnight, and Huggy gets down to the true kernel.

 

“So what do the doctors say?”

I let out a slow breath. 

 

“Well, pancreatic cancer - it isn’t a good one.  It’s – what do they call it – locally advanced.  I start chemo when I get back.  The doctors don’t sound optimistic.  Annie, on the other hand, thinks I’ll be good as new in a couple months.”

 

Huggy nods and smiles slightly. 

 

“Hey, Huggy,” I say.  “Did you ever think you’d outlive all of us?”

 

He stands up, makes himself tall.  He struts like a pigeon.

 

“I jus’ keep on truckin’ and leave all those jive turkeys in my dust,” he says, and we both laugh.  God, how did we take ourselves seriously?

 

 

***

 

 

In the morning, I drive.

 

I’ve forgotten how dry it is.  On 128 in Boston the median strips are green and lush from a rainy summer, and here the grass is burned brown, the only green deliberate: shrubs, palm trees.  More graffiti, more signs in Spanish, and the haze I’d forgotten, too.  Suburbs turn into city proper, and I feel the map in my mind kick in.  I turn right, onto the grid of side streets.  Left here, three blocks –  it hasn’t changed, really, not once you get away from the parts they’ve prettied up – that alley off West Washington, we used to turn there sometimes, and Tacos Lupita – how can it still be here?  But it is.  I pull over, take the key out of the ignition.

 

“That ain’t health food.”  The voice, gone for years, and here it is.  So simple, it’s like someone turned on a light switch. 

 

“Well, Starsk,” I tell him, “When you’re my age, there’s not much point in wasting time on kale.”

 

No answer, but I can wait.

 

The station house and the courthouse and the impound garage.  The Learning Collaborative – used to be the Marshal Center.  The gym and the pool and the basketball courts.  A thousand slumbering pieces awaken in my mind.  I wonder how many hours – hell, months - we spent in a car, in the sun, driving, driving, how many countless back-forth trips down these same streets.

 

Where The Pits should be there are a couple hotels, now – a parking lot across the street.  Not so gritty.  I drive east.  The house on Ridgeway is the same, white and three garages.  A woman comes out and stares at me, so I don’t linger. 

 

“Thinks you’re a peeping Tom, Hutch.”

 

West, to Venice.  Lord, they’ve gentrified the Canal District.  I go to my cottage, but my cottage is gone, replaced by a small mansion with stucco walls and pseudo-Spanish architecture.  The view along the canal is lush now, green and dotted with carefully-tended trees and flowers.  Ducks paddle in the water.  I hear the cicadas thrumming – I had forgotten them - like the breathing of the world.  The smell is the same: sun-baking ground, and oleander and bee balm, and the hint of salt air. 

 

“I still say it’s possible for a shark to migrate up that canal.”

 

I check in at the Venice Beach Hotel.  Premiere Ocean View King Suite.  It’s a large room with trendy aqua walls and a spacious sitting area and kitchenette. Wide ocean view, balcony.  Put it on the credit card, worry about the bill later.  One thing you can’t see on the east coast is sunset over the ocean.  It’s worth paying for.

 

I go to the car to get my things.  When I open the trunk, I find a black plastic milk crate lying next to my suitcase.  A card is taped to the top.  I pluck it loose, read Huggy’s script:

 

_Hutch -  When you asked me to clean out your storage unit, I couldn’t throw these out.  Good memories, I hope.  -H_

 

My hands kick up dust and I sneeze.  Under the dust are LPs.  At the top of the pile, Charlie Rich in his brown leather hat and sideburns, staring at me from “Behind Closed Doors.”  A flutter of remembering.

 

“You’re killing me, Huggy,” I say, lifting the bin.

 

The balcony of my hotel room overlooks the beach, used to be my beach.  I look down at the scramble of tourists and panhandlers and pierced, shaved-head teenagers.  The balcony is set up with an iron table and two cushioned chairs.  I set the crate there, and pull out the Charlie Rich album. 

 

The smell that comes out is old paper and vinyl and dust.  Age, but clean and good.  The spiking ecstasy of my early twenties, when treasure – identity, even - was the milk crate full of albums, and high-tech was the smell of vinyl sliding out of its sleeve, blowing imaginary dust from the grooves, stereo needles and wires and giant speakers.  Hauling the ridiculous weight of that milk crate to a block party.  On the way home, a stolen Radio Flyer wagon, dumping the crate in, running and laughing, drunk.

 

Just the _smell_ of the records sets me time-travelling.  It occurs to me that if I’m going to wallow, I’m going to need alcohol and a record player. 

 

Venice provides.  At the Davy Jones liquor store on Navy Street, I buy a bottle of Crown Royal and put it in the trunk of my car.   Around the corner, up a couple blocks, I find the Saint Joseph Thrift Center.  It smells like every Salvation Army and Goodwill: stale clothes pulled from a grandmother’s closet, untouched in decades.  In the back, on a shelf housing microwaves and waffle irons and bakelite radios, I spot a vintage box record player, tan fabric with speakers on the sides.  All-in-one:  lift the lid and plug it in and you’re a DJ.  The worker at the thrift store lets me test it on a “Sing Along with Mitch” album.  The needle works, and the fife-and-drum ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ plays crisp and clear. 

 

Back at the hotel, I call Annie, to reassure her that I’m alive, still planning on catching my plane in the morning.  She worries at me: sleep and vitamins and flights and appointments.  As soon as I hang up, I pour myself a shot and swallow it, fast.

 

I set myself up on the balcony.  Shot glass, record player, comfy chair facing the water.  From down below comes the hubbub of busy recreation:  kids squealing, gulls calling, tinny music from a radio – no, not a radio, kids don’t carry radios anymore.  The smell of funnel cakes and onion rings and a hundred fried things.

 

I cue up track one on side two of old Charlie Rich, and enjoy the hiss and scratch of needle on vinyl, that tiny anticipation before a song begins.  Low, jangling piano, and then: _Hey… did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world…_

 

I close my eyes, and 1975 settles on me.  A.M. radio, sitting in a treeless Von’s parking lot in San Pedro waiting for a perp to show, and it’s 98 degrees.  A headache from the persistent smell of diesel, and the sound of Starsky’s voice singing over Charlie’s, too loud.  Sweat running down my face, and my back hurts from sitting here so long, and I want to throttle him, but instead I hiss, “Shut. Up.”

 

His voice: “You know you have terrible manners?” 

 

I chuckle.  “Yeah.”

 

The whiskey and the music do their work. 

 

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” is my teenage bedroom, a plaid bedspread and college pennants on the wall, and I’m playing records loud to cover the sounds of my parents fighting downstairs, and under the bed is a six-pack:  I’m so sophisticated that Joey and I sneak beer up here and my parents don’t ever find out.

 

“Pet Sounds” is the tiny third-floor apartment I rented while I went to the Academy. Filthy bathroom,  filthy kitchen, splitting rent with Mark Kensington and that other guy - weird one who smelled like mustard - Alec Banaszewski.  We boil pasta four nights a week, and play ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ trying to match the falsetto voices.  One night Kensington comes home with “Revolver” and we listen all night, until I’ve memorized ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘For No One.’

 

I surprise myself, finding albums I hardly remember: Herman’s Hermits and The Turtles, and – God - Barry Manilow?  I could not have bought a Barry Manilow album.  It must have belonged to someone else.

 

“Yours,” Starsky says.

 

“No – nope, not a chance.”

 

“You bought it and you played it very loud one night and said Barry was a classically romantic song stylist.  You sang ‘Mandy.’ ”

 

“Then I must have been drunk.”

“I don’t deny that.”

 

I am drunk, now.  Starsky’s voice persists longer with every song.  The drunker I get, the solider he gets.

 

I am singing through “Tea for the Tillerman,” and Starsky joins in on ‘Father and Son’ – I’m father, he’s son - and I know it’s the whiskey, but I wonder if the other people in the hotel can hear both of us.  All three of us:  Cat and me and Starsky.  At the end, when we’re all in at once – _if they were right, I’d agree, but it’s them they know, not me_ \- voices doing a crescendo, I lean my head back and laugh.  This song: this tiny joy, so long, unknowingly missed. 

 

I don’t want to play ‘Mandy,’ but Starsky insists.

“I’m telling you: _I_ know you better than _you_ know you, and you love that song.”

“I think I’d remember.”

“I think you forgot.” 

 

I cue up side one, track three, and the piano intro begins and - God - he shows up for real: visible, bodily, incarnate. 

 

I can _see_ him, and every piece is correct: the geometry of his hands, the way his hair curves and falls, the tilt of his neck and the angle of his shoulders.  He’s wearing blue tennis shoes and jeans with a t-shirt.  A red jacket – no, an oversized red shirt, in worn corduroy.  He settles down in the chair across from me, leans back, and puts his feet on the table.  I look in his open blue live eyes, and they look back. 

 

“What’s the matter?” he asks, arching his eyebrows.

 

I keep my eyes still in hopes that he won’t vanish.  Don’t startle him – no, no, that’s for bears, snakes, not…  not imaginary friends.  Don’t close your eyes. 

 

Starsky is remarkably stable – no flickering, no transfiguration - and the piano gives way to vocals.  _I remember all my life, raining down as cold as ice._ I dare to blink.  He’s still there.  I try to work my voice. 

 

“Nothing,” I say.  “It’s just – uh - been a while.  Good to see you.” 

 

Still there. 

 

I’m staring.  Is it rude to stare?  I don’t know the etiquette.  Do I offer him a drink?  Make small talk? 

 

“Uh… Starsk? Is this my life flashing before my eyes?  ‘Cause if it is, I’ve gotta say it’s a bit premature.”

 

“Whaddya mean?” he says.

 

“I’m trying to figure out if you’re a ghost, or just a maudlin figment of my imagination.”

 

His eyebrows go up.

 

“How do you know _you’re_ not a ghost or a maudlin figment of _my_ imagination?” 

 

I think about that for a minute. 

 

“Man’s got a point.”  I raise my glass and decide to just go with it. 

_I never realized how happy you made me oh Mandy_

 

It’s a surprise.  Allegedly drunk vintage Hutch was correct.  Barry Manilow is a genius.  I find myself rocking my head along with the melody.  _Standing on the edge of time._ The kids on the beach laugh and scream, a kite flutters, and the gulls cry as they ride the thermals, and – oh - the rising bridge.  If this were a concert, I would raise a lighter.  The sweeping violins and the cresting key change at the end.  _And I need you today ooooooh Mandy._  God, everyone should get drunk with Barry Manilow and a ghost. 

 

Starsky smiles, wide and easy.

 

“I told you so.” 

 

I shrug.  “What can I say - when you’re right, you’re right.” 

 

I breathe in, sigh deep as the song fades.  And take in something – something in the air.

“What’s that smell?” I say.

 

He looks down, sniffs at his sleeve.  “Cigars,” he says.  “This was my father’s shirt.”

 

I nod.  Just go with it.  

 

Flipping through the records, I come across “Let it Be.” I pour another tall drink and settle back in my chair.  I sip and watch Starsky and ‘Two of Us’ scratches and pops through the air.  From down below, on the beach, I hear a whoop of “Beatles, yeah!” and several ecstatic, unfettered young voices screech the lyrics along with the record.  _You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead._ Oh, Beatles, oh poignant lyrics.  Starsky, you never even knew about John. 

 

About John, or Boston, or Annie and Grace, or the baby.  Hell, you never knew about _microwaves_.  I should tell you.  Annie, she – oh, and she says to tell you hello.  Thirty years, I need to tell you -

 

The sliding guitar intro to ‘Across the Universe’ comes on, and God, I had forgotten.   I pick up the album cover, and see the initials scratched with pen into the white space near George Harrison’s face: TR.  Starsky’s album, down from Terry, down to me. This song, late at night, when sleep wouldn’t come.

 

“Do you remember what you said, Starsk?”  I ask, holding my voice steady.

 

“What’s that?” 

 

_Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup_

“About Terry – how you said - you thought maybe when we die, everything inside us is released out into the universe?  All the stories and music?  Everything, going out and away?”

 

Starsky looks at me, long, then shakes his head and shrugs, palms up. 

 

My eyes blur, and I blink.  He should remember that, at least.  That aching conversation - the one that kept me on my feet some days, kept me upright. 

 

A little help, Starsk.  You’re the one holding all the evidence. 

He studies me for a minute.  His eyes are calm and patient.  Then he stands and walks over to me, holds his forearm up to my face.  

“This is my father’s shirt,” he says.  “Smell.”

  
I can see where the elbows are worn shiny.  I inhale.  Cigar smoke and Ivory soap and aftershave – Old Spice?  Underneath, faint -

  
I look at him, expectantly. 

 

“After he died, I kept this shirt in my bedroom, because it smelled like him.”

“Uh huh.” 

 

“Except,” he says,  “I lost it.  After we moved out of the old house, I just couldn’t find it.” 

 

_Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes_

 

I nod my head.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that shirt.  I’m hazy sleepy drunk now; it’s hard to focus my eyes. 

“But, look, Hutch.”

 

_Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box_

 

“Hutch!”  Starsky’s voice startles me from the first whisper of sleep.  He tugs at the loose tails of his shirt.  “Look.  I can smell my father.  _You_ can smell him.”

 

My thoughts spin and try to realign.  I look at the shirt, catch a whiff of the cigar-soap smell. Underneath, faint, the smell of countless days: the red car, Starsky in the driver’s seat.  Hope rises, quiet and small and unexpected.

 

“Starsk – Do you think it all comes back to us?”

 

_The dust motes dancing in the light that slants through the window of my first grade classroom just before Miss Stearns comes in and the blast of heat_

He looks at me, questioning.

 

_the blast of heat and the smell of almond as my grandmother pulls the cookies out of the oven and Grace’s tiny baby fingernails, so small I’m afraid to cut them, and the yellow canal cottage, oleander and cicadas, pizza and Cat Stevens on the stereo, and Starsky is there, and Huggy, and we’re so young and filled-up-happy but we don’t know it_

Focus.  Focus. 

“All the things we lost,” I say.  “All the things we forgot.”

 

His head goes back slightly, and a long, slow smiles comes to his eyes.

  
“Hutch,” he says.  “I’m _here_ , right?”

 

_Starsky is there, and Huggy, and we’re so young and filled-up-happy but we don’t know it, I don’t know it, I’m too young then - later, I know, later - his face against the wheel – so still, grey-white - and when I kneel down, so much blood the smell_

“Hutch.”  He snaps a finger. 

 

I lift my head.  His face is ruddy, his eyes locked on mine.  Open, blue, live.

 

“Yeah,” I say.  “OK.  Yeah.”

 

_Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns and calls me on and on – on and on – on and on -_

 

The record lurches and skips - _on and on_ \- and sleep settles on me like snowfall.  My eyes slide shut - no, not yet _,_ I need to - open, open, I manage, and look at Starsky, give myself orders - remember his _eyes;_ remember his _voice_ – and I clutch at words, my mouth slow and thick and whispering

 

“Starsk - ”

 

He looks at me, gives a hint of a nod.

 

“S’OK, Hutch.”

 

and my eyelids are so heavy now, I can’t keep them open _the smell of blood and amaretto and Old Spice_ and already his voice is growing distant, muffled, and the song recedes _on and on_ and the light grows grey and dim and I hope he’s right and God, God Starsky please be right

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews are the only payment a fanfic author is allowed to receive. Please?


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